Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:20:59 -0500
Reply-To: joel walker <uncajoel@BELLSOUTH.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: joel walker <uncajoel@BELLSOUTH.NET>
Subject: Re: your Boat, Ginger Clown the Dream ...
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> FWIW if you stay lucky you'll be as old and abused as me, BZ, Unca
> Joel and
> the wizard of all thingies electrical the venrable David Bierl some
> day.
> Keep on keepin on.
being of those mentioned in this rant, i feel compelled to warn all
those young whippersnappers still in training pants that it ain't
necessarily "staying lucky" that gets you this old and abused. :(
the only thing worse than being in the wrong place at the wrong time
with the wrong people is being in the right place at the right time
with the right people.
both situations can be hazardous to your long-term health. :)
actually any combination of those things can be dangerous ...
wrong place right time right people
right place wrong time right people
etc.
but we've all got to be somewhere sometime. and no matter where you
go, there you are! ;) and if you can't be with the one you love, then
love whoever's handy. or something like that.
and always remember ...
When Confused and When in Doubt,
Run in Circles, Scream and Shout,
Lower the Lifeboat, Fire the Gun,
Salute the Flag ... Well Done!!
:)
so now i'll leave you all with this little tidbit (by someone other
than Phineas T. Bluster) ...
O'kane & The People's Truck
by Dick O'Kane <Road & Track, July 1971>
I should be uplifted by the scene today ... made whole in the soul
while my mind reclines on soft thoughts and nibbles at the little
peeled grapes of delight that surround me. For the vista at this
moment on this day is one many men dream of as they sit starched and
confined on a cold winter Monday.
The scene is typical enough ... for here. The cafe features the
Mandatory Picture of the king, Optional Suggested Picture of the
king's
father, a sooty Moroccan flag, a roaring, hissing coffee machine with
attendant harrassed attendant, and a flood of blazing, gold-white
sunshine ... hot and fine and welcome enough to bleach out almost any
care. I say ALMOST any care, for I'm beset by a malady, a longing,
a certain madness that comes in recurring attacks, and needs only a
reminder to trip off an episode. Like right now; I should be
transported by the veiled ladies in white, and by the roaring towers
of white spray where the sunlit surf crashes over the ruins of the
ancient castle, but it's lost on me. Because THEY are there at the
curb.
Six . . . seven . . . ten of them. Ten Volkswagen vans. To me at
this
moment in history their presence, their being, the whirring,
clittering
bumble of their hopeless little engines is an affront, a cruelty, a
taunt beyond endurance, because dammit, I WANT ONE! Gone is the low,
snarling red fantasy, vanished in a cloud of rubber smoke and
expensive
fumes, to be replaced by dreams of . . . but you'd laugh.
Christ, it's like being infatuated with a fat, ugly woman.
And as with both women and cars, when you want one most, none are
available.
I suppose I got into this Volksie van thing about the same way
everybody else does. At one point a while back I found myself with
more than an E-Type could accommodate, i.e., a fallen-down farm and
a woman possessed of all the best and worst qualities of mistress and
magpie. See, Jeffi's a compulsive trash-picker, and many's the time
I've answered the phone to an excited description of the perfectly
good
and excessively groovy 7-foot walnut and velvet couch simply sitting
there on the sidewalk waiting for the trash man, and could I please
get
out the Jaguar and come help pack it on home . . .
Now, an E Jaguar has many remarkable abilities, but drayage is not
one of them. So, typically, when a friend's clapped-out, clattering
Volksie van came up for sale, we bought it, typically, for $400. It
was one of the window vans with seats, about a '64, and we figured it
would be nice to have around ... you know, something to rumble down to
the dump with every few days . . . or maybe to drive to town once a
week to transport a few little sticks of furniture . . .
Anyway, that was the plan, and it soon got out of hand in
predictable fashion ... Jeffi and I squabbled daily over the thing
while the E rusted silently in the barn. And by the end of the summer
we were so capivated by that improbable conveyance that we were
practically living in it. It may surprise you, but a Volksie van is
one of the most delightful vehicles on the road ... or off. And it is
first, last and always eminently useful and sensible ... a cheap,
practical trundle-all for the Average Man ... a veritable People's
Truck, in fact, designed with the same quaint attention to Common
Sense
that guided the development of the People's Car.
Research the matter a little and you'll find that there are four
kinds of Volksie vans ... hundred-dollar ones, four-hundred-dollar
ones,
eight-hundred-dollar ones and new ones. A four-hundred-dollar one is
actually a hundred-dollar one for which someone managed to get four
hundred dollars, and an eight-hundred-dollar one is a four-hundred-
dollar one with paint. A new one is any one with a one-piece wind-
shield. And whether you get it new or used, you can take your choice
or your chance and get it with or without windows, with or without
seats, beds, a kitchen, whatever ... there is a People's Truck and
stuff
to go in it for everyone. (Another fact of economics ... when you
have
a Volksie van, everybody wants to buy it, except when you want to sell
it; then you can't give it away.)
No matter what kind of body/interior it has, you can call it a bus,
a truck or a van and no one will care, not even the parts man. Our
first one had windows and we called it The Truck, while our second one
had none and we called it The Bus. See, it all depends on whether you
come to regard yourself as the driver of a truck or a bus. The
vehicle
itself will force you into one of these roles because you sit WAY up
high over all the other traffic, and the way your hands fall on the
big
horizontal wheel is . . . well, you just get into being a bus/truck
driver, that's all.
Whether you're bussing or trucking, you can carry a prodigious load
of goods and/or people; in fact, the thing has a bigger capacity than
the average owner will ever use. With seats, it's cozy with nine, or
you can take out the seats in about 2-1/2 minutes and pack in an
entire
sub-culture. Other things you can put in a Volksie bus and take
places
include 12 to 18 great big dogs, sound equipment for a rock group,
nine
weeks' garbage or four weeks' trash, a winter's worth of firewood, two
cows, most of your friends, a young elephant, 16 Arab ladies, or a
big,
hairy motorcycle. Though not all at once. And when you're through,
you can simply hose the whole thing out.
Best of all, though, you can throw everyone and everything out and
move into your truck to live. That's actually my rationale for
wanting
one here on the west coast of Africa. It'll accommodate a double bed,
your camping stuff and all the crap you acquire in New Hope, Coney
Island or Marrakech. And when you're through acquiring, you don't
have
to pay New Hope or Coney Island or Marrakech prices for a room ...
just
drive until you find a place with a free view. And if the roadside
doesn't suit you, leave it ... the People's Truck stands tall and
proud
on its skinny tires, most of its vitals tucked up out of reach of
those
big pointy rocks, and it can take you pretty far afield without damage
or embarrassment to itself or its load.
And, mind you, it does all this on dainty sips of the gas-station
man's most humble potion, with an engine that seems to require nothing
more than privacy.
This is not to say that People's Trucking is ALL roses and light,
though. For all this common sense, economy and space, one pays one's
dues. For instance, consider the shape and size of the thing. It has
all the aerodynamic purity of a sheet-iron cow shed, and if you like
the
sedan in a cross-wind, you'll just LOVE the truck! It doesn't just
meander around the road in the wind, either. It blows helplessly
around like a big empty box, it can meander clear OFF the road in a
trice, and sudden bullish charges into the other lane are commonplace
... but here, at last, after all these years, YOU get a chance to
frighten all the oncoming traffic.
There are other wind hazards. For instance, there's headwind,
which
can turn a 2-hour trip into a 4-hour one, and there's tailwind, which
can get you arrested for speeding, as it's the only way you can ever
hope to exceed a turnpike speed limit. Then there's truck wind, which
happens every time a truck passes you, which is quite often. This
requires a high degree of hard left rudder, as the bow wave of a big
truck can blow you right off into the ditch.
Without wind, the performance of the People's Truck will probably
please Mom more than Dad. The handbook says the one-, four- and
eight-
hundred-dollar series will make a breathless 65, and it will ... on
the
flat with no wind and after about fifteen minutes of gritting your
teeth in a sympathetic effort (sometimes it helps to lean forward in
the seat and bounce gently up and down, too). Once underway, you
drive
flat out, and you soon learn to conserve headway like diamonds. You
find yourself taking all kinds of wild chances, nipping though narrow
openings, passing when you shouldn't, ANYTHING to save lifting your
foot.
If you do any driving through hilly terrain, you'll learn something
very valuable ... how to enjoy scenery. This is something you'll HAVE
to learn to save your sanity, because there is precious little else to
do ... though on a REALLY hilly road, you can always read.
Noise is something else you learn to take in stride, but not with
all models. Some of them are all fancy and padded inside and are
therefore pretty silent, but not all of them. See, the average
garden-
variety Volksie van is tastefully trimmmed in booming, clanging sheet
metal, and fast passage over a bumpy road is like rolling down a
cobblestone hill in a galvanized garbage can.
There are a couple of rememdies for this, though. One is to glue
old carpeting, jute bags and foam rubber all over the interior, which
will quiet things down some, and another is to overwhelm the clatter
with a ruckus of one's own ... like a good, big stereo tape system.
In
fact, one of the most impressive sound systems I've ever heard lived
in
a Volksie truck, along with an oriental carpet, an overstuffed
armchair,
a gigantic brass hookah and a Tiffany lamp. The truck was loud, but
the
tapes were louder, and a twist of the knob would drown out everything
...
the indigenous clatter, the leaky muffler, the hard metallic vibration
and all that traffic blowing to pass. That's the thing ... you don't
dare get too quiet. I knew another guy who had a panel with a window
in it right behind the front seats, and it made the cab so quiet that
one day he got out on the turnpike, couldn't hear the engine screaming
that it was still in third gear, and didn't even hear it when it
finally
blew up. He thought he was out of gas, and it wasn't until he tried
the
starter with the door open that he heard all the broken pieces
churning
around.
Yet another hassle you learn to live with is cops. You'd think
that
a vehicle capable of nothing more dangerous than a brisk trundle would
be left alone by the fuzz, but it is not so. Because of its nature
...
cheap practicality with a highly mobile view ... the Volksie van is
rapidly becoming the Official Vehicle of the International Counter-
Culture, which means young people with hair, bright clothing, rather
loose schedules and other such threats to God and Country. To the
average cop, then, that big tin box full of hair, gasping up the hill
is nothing more than the Main Stash ... a thousand-kilo brick of
Panama Red disguised as a Volksie van, with windows and doors and
freaks painted on it and WOW, we're all gonna make Sergeant! It isn't
"Where's the fire?" anymore, it's "Where's the grass?" and unless you
look like Mr. Clean going somewhere to scrub a floor, you can plan to
spend some time by the side of the road explaining your identity,
destination, political views and whatever's in your pockets with The
Man.
A friend of mine gets his lumps in by always offering the cop the
T-key to the engine compartment, the cop always goes to look, and he
always gets all smarmy and gresy in the process, but beyond that,
there's nothing you can do . . . except vote for me and Stan Mott in
'72. If elected, we will have all the drivers of port-hole Buicks
stopped and hassled about income tax evasion.
But these are mere annoyances. The real danger ... the Ultimate
Hazard of People's Trucking is the Sorcerer's Apprentice Syndrome.
Reducted to simplicity, this is where you say to your woman, "Behold,
for I have brought thee a truck ... go ye therefore and collect groovy
things and bring them here to make our house fulsome and glad."
And she does.
Giving a truck to a compulsive trash-picker is like giving
automatic
weapons to Attila the Hun. Even with an empty 10-bedroom farmhouse we
were soon overwhelmed with Stuff. After we'd owned the truck a month,
for instance, George gave us a painting for the house ... a small
2-ft-
by-2-ft painting, already, and we couldn't find a place for it! And
then there was all that stuff in the barn when we left . . . Lord!
Your
only consolation when this sort of thing starts is that you have a
truck
with which to cart it all away again ... on days when your wife lefts
you use it.
Then there's the heater, and the matter of cold weather . . . but
enough. You should have the picture by now. Still, you can't know
the
true, deep-down nature of the beast until you've lived with one for
awhile ... and then you begin to see that besides all its Teutonic
sensibility and practicality and usefulness, there's just something
about the People's truck that's . . . well . . . SILLY. And fun.
It's
like owning a pack elephant that says and does droll things ...
a cartoon hippopotamus that brings you the paper and reads over your
shoulder and agrees with you about important things, like where to go
today, and where to spend the night and when to leave. I think Lewis
Carroll would have owned one. Dammit, they CAPTIVATE, that's all, and
people respond by painting them colors and naming them things, like
Fantasia and Moby Truck and Brunhilde. In fact, last night while
dreaming over the fire I decided I'd get one without windows next, and
paint it candy-apple red with a gigantic black Maltese Cross on the
side, and put a bit helmet spike on top of the cab and call it the
Iron
Chancellor . . .
High on a ridge about two miles up the beach, I can see a silver
thread of road glistening with last night's rain, and on the thread
like
a colorful beads are four . . . six . . . seven little dots. More
Volkswagen vans. One of those dudes has just GOT to be for sale, I
betcha.
Does anybody feel like taking a walk up the beach after breakfast?
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